3 - How Comity Makes Transnationalism Work

Summary

This article argues that the concept of comity plays an important role in making transnational things work – the global market, hyper-politicised situations, the proliferation of international courts and tribunals, and legal harmonisation and coordination across borders. The idea is that comity might not contribute much to the construction of a clean theoretical edifice, one that agrees with binary, Cartesian, logical thinking. True. It might even undermine such a construction. But it helps to just make things work. This indeed is why comity was developed in the first place – that is, to make sovereignty work in the face of the pragmatic transnationalism that characterises so much of real-world life. The article starts with sovereignty – a nice and clean idea in theory that required comity to work well in practice – and then proceeds with a discussion of how comity helps the operations of the transnational things just mentioned.